Juniper bolsters next-gen firewall solutions

Enhancements to SRX Series Services Gateways aimed at flexibility, granularity

Juniper Networks this week announced enhancements to its Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) solutions.

The changes are to the company's SRX Series Services Gateways and include centralised management of Juniper Networks SRX and virtual Firefly Perimeter firewalls with Junos Space Security Director.

Additionally, Juniper Networks SRX now integrates directly with Active Directory to apply user role-based firewall policies without requiring any additional devices or agents. The new AppID engine includes a heuristics system optimised for identifying evasive or tunneled applications. This feature is aimed at blocking risky elements such as peer-to-peer applications or adding control over social, video and communications applications such as Skype or BitTorrent. AppID will also identify nearly twice as many unique applications as before, Juniper said.

Firefly Perimeter, Juniper's virtual firewall, now supports NGFW capabilities like IPS and UTM. These services enable Firefly users to layer additional levels of security into their networks to protect against exploits trying to compromise weaknesses in applications and protect against malware, spam and other content-based threats.

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The NGFW solution is also open to customisation to meet specific security needs. AppID and IPS signatures are written in an open language so corporate IT security teams can write their own signatures that may not be in the standard application database.

Juniper noted that comparatively few companies were adopting next-gen firewall technology in a climate of increase malicious cyber activity, but that this is expected to change. Citing Gartner research, Juniper said less than 20% of enterprise Internet connections today are secured using NGFWs but that by the end of this year, the proportion will rise to 35% of the installed base, with 70% of new purchases being NGFWs.

"Juniper Networks is committed to providing enterprises with security technologies that deliver the performance, flexibility and control needed to protect against the ever-evolving threats they face," said Nawaf Bitar, senior vice president and general manager, Security Business Unit, Juniper Networks. "The new capabilities in our Next-Generation Firewall products give our customers even more options to manage and secure the enterprise edge with improved control and efficiency."